Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is threatening to keep the Senate in session and voting over the weekend and into the week of Christmas to break a Republican blockade of President Biden’s nominees.
More broadly, the former president has focused the nation’s attention on China as the United States’s premier national security concern, putting pressure on Senate Republicans to support legislation Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer
McConnell is the most powerful Republican leader in Washington, but he doesn’t have the same unrivaled platform that he did when he was in the same position head of the minority opposition in Washington at the start of former President Obama’s tenure.
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McConnell has seized on Biden’s announcement that he will withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan as a prime example of him talking like a centrist but governing from the left.
I think it s worth talking about but I don t think there will be any Republican support none, zero for the $4.1 trillion grab bag which has infrastructure in it but a whole lot of other stuff, McConnell said in a press conference in Kentucky.
Biden has proposed a sweeping roughly $4 trillion infrastructure package broken up into two pieces: A $2.3 trillion jobs package and a $1.8 trillion families package. While the package includes money for roads, bridges and broadband, it also expands into manufacturing, in-home care, housing, clean energy, public schools and manufacturing.
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Democrats are likely to have to go it alone under reconciliation which allows them to bypass the 60-vote filibuster to pass most, if not all, of Biden s package.
They argue that the No. 3 Republican has repeatedly contradicted McCarthy and his team, undermining the party’s message and its efforts to take back the House majority in next year’s midterm elections.
“There is no way that Liz will be conference chair by month’s end,” one key McCarthy ally told The Hill on Monday. “When there is a vote, it won’t be a long conference; it will be fast. Everyone knows the outcome.”
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The developments suggest it is not just members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who are pushing to get rid of Cheney; senior lawmakers in the 154-member Republican Study Committee, the largest GOP caucus on Capitol Hill, have been openly critical of Cheney and are now trying to orchestrate her removal.
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The letter, released on Monday, added that the board s structure is flawed, leading to slow reactions to crises and politically driven decision-making.
Ex-Capitol Police chief Steven Sund has said that he asked the now-former House and Senate sergeants-at-arms ahead of Jan. 6 for permission to request placing the D.C. National Guard on standby in case police needed reinforcements to help control the expected pro-Trump crowd. Sund has said both sergeants-at-arms turned down his request, with Paul Irving, the House sergeant-at-arms at the time, saying he wasn t comfortable with the optics of formally making an emergency declaration ahead of the Electoral College proceedings.